The House of Representatives’ committee on ways and means on Tuesday expressed hope that the second package of the administration’s tax reform law will be acceptable to the Filipino people by labeling it as the Tax Reform for Attracting Better and High-quality Opportunities or TRABAHO.
This came after the committee, led by Dakila Carlo Cua, approved the substitute measure that is aimed at sustaining the Philippines’ strong fiscal performance and aggressive spending plan into the medium term.
“There is no more TRAIN 2. The second package of the administration’s tax reform law is dubbed as TRABAHO, which goal is to create jobs by attracting the right set of investments through incentives,” Cua said after the bill’s passage in his committee.
In other developments:
• More than half of the intended beneficiaries of the unconditional cash transfer program have already received the funds meant to help them cope with the effects of the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion or TRAIN Law, the Finance department said Tuesday.
“Our latest count for the distribution of unconditional cash transfer is 5.3-million recipients, that is out of the 10-million [targeted beneficiaries] this year,” Finance Assistant Secretary Tony Lambino said during the briefing by the economic managers on the proposed national budget for 2019.
• Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez on Tuesday said they were upbeat about generating P181.4 billion from the TRAIN and the proposed tax Reform package 1B in order for the government to raise total revenues of P3.2 trillion in 2019.
Package 1B is a complementary reform to the TRAIN law that covers tax amenesty and adjustments in the motor vehicle user charge.
“This is is equivalent to 16.5 percent of GDP, an improvement of the 15.6 percent achieved in 2017 and this year’s target of 16.2 percent,” Dominguez said during the Development Budget Coordination Committee’s Senate briefing on the proposed P3.757- trillion budget for 2019.
He expressed hope that the revenues will grow by 12.7 percent in 2019. The tax revenues will increase by 12.7 percent with the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Bureau of Customs expected to post a collection growth of 13.1 percent and 11.3 percent, respectively.
Senator Bam Aquino said the government must act now to ease the burden of the high prices of goods and services on the Filipino people by immediately suspending the excise tax on fuel under the TRAIN Law.
Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo earlier said passing the second package of the administration’s tax reform law was a priority of the House leadership, having it part of President Rodrigo Duterte’s legislative agenda, and was tagged as urgent in his State of the Nation Address.
Cua said TRABAHO hoped to modernize the country’s incentive regime as well as reduce corporate income taxes.
“Generating better opportunities for Filipinos has always been our primary objective in this exercise… We are also lowering the burden on businesses so that they can expand and provide more employment opportunities,” Cua said.
Under the proposed second package of the tax reform law, the government aims to lower the corporate income tax from 30 percent to 25 percent and to modernize the fiscal incentives to attract new and growing industries.
Dominguez earlier said the government hoped to raise P3.2 trillion in revenues in 2019, including about P181.4 billion from tax reform, which would help sustain its strong fiscal performance and aggressive spending plan into the medium term.
Dominguez said this revenue goal was equivalent to 16.5 percent of the gross domestic product, which is an improvement from the 15.6 percent attained in 2017 and this year’s target of 16.2 percent. With Macon Ramos-Araneta